Europe to promote venture capital
The commission hopes that by making capital accessible to companies, Europe can help reduce the high level of unemployment affecting the continent. Unlike the US, where a large number of venture capit...
Astronomers focus on thefuture
The meeting, attended by 200 astronomers, discussed the future of more than 40 facilities and drew up a plan to provide a basis for budget discussions with the ministry for education and research. It ...
Europe’s aerospace firms stick to their guns
Officials from all three countries are concerned at the rapid spate of mergers in the US defence and aerospace industry, and hope that a European equivalent can be created to compete against the Ameri...
Researching the Web
On page 98 of the April 3 issue of Science Steve Lawrence and Lee Giles of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, report that no search engine covers more that one third of the 320 milli...
Students face hard choices
The University and College Admissions Service says that applications for undergraduate physics courses have fallen by just 1.2%, compared with a drop of 4.2% in all subjects. It has received 17 377 ap...
Chaos starts to communicate
Gregory VanWiggeren and Rajarshi Roy of the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US have now used chaotic lasers to generate the complex signals of the type needed in many of today’s communica...
Nuclear waste dump could be unstable
The new findings is reported by Brian Wernicke and colleagues from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in the current issue of Science ...
Defence diversification agency to be created
DERA has an annual turnover of £1bn, 90% of which comes from the Ministry of Defence, and is active in many areas of physics including semiconductors, materials and optics. The agency would encou...
CERN head to move to UCL
During his five-year tenure at CERN, Llewellyn Smith has overseen an increase in funds for the Large Hadron Collider by persuading countries outside CERN, particularly the US, to become involved in th...
NuPECC recommends future for nuclear physics
In the report NuPECC suggests that national funding agencies should become more involved during the planning stage of these new facilities because future facilities and detectors will be significantly...
